Francis Irving has posted about the initiative on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. His main point is that “this project will need a vast amount of basic legal information to be open first” and that, so far, legislation is the only data set approaching openness.
Of course it would be dandy if all PSI were truly open – ie not just free access and freely re-usable but directly addressable and accessible via APIs etc. Indications are that we will have this for legislation soon, but for case law and other official documents that may be a long time coming. And most privately-authored content will, by definition, never be open.
But I’m a great believer in the power of metadata – ie data about data – and the white knight to the rescue here is RSS. Whoever you are, tell us about your data via rich RSS feeds and we can build the framework of the Free Legal Web with that, respecting your rights and reservations and leaving the content where it is. We may need to convince you that it’s in your interest to do so – but that’s for another post.
From an OPSI perspective, I want to understand how we need to present legislative data in order for such social production activities to flourish. I am quite taken by the PRESTO approach to legislation publishing. If we implemented this for legislation as revised and enacted, it should help considerably?
As regards the content, we’re working on increasing the scope of our coverage on the OPSI website – which I hope will help.
I shall be coming to the event on the 18th October with that one objective in mind, understanding what we need to do, both technically and in policy terms, to enable the Free Legal Web to happen.
It is an exciting ambition which has my support.
John Sheridan
Head of e-Services, OPSI.
Francis’s request to the “unlocking service” for enabling access to Case Law information from the Court Service has been posted here:
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/unlocking-service/2008/08/20/CaseLaw. You can support this request by voting for it.
John Sheridan
Head of e-Services, OPSI.
Well, its a scandal that the court service decided to stop publishing what it was publishing – very much contrary to the trend towards openness. I was shocked when I found the judgment database (which I had been quietly scraping) was taken down. The tribunals service (via a much harder to scrape interface, Francis and I spent ages trying to work it out) does a much better job and the RPTS tries to put everything up. Its all useful.
But there’s much much more that’s too old to have gotten on to all these internet databases. That would be useful too. However, I think you are going to get lawyers to contribute on substantive material (coz that’s intersting) and geeks to contribute on stuff that is database like. Sadly I am both
.
Well, its a scandal that the court service decided to stop publishing what it was publishing – very much contrary to the trend towards openness. I was shocked when I found the judgment database (which I had been quietly scraping) was taken down. The tribunals service (via a much harder to scrape interface, Francis and I spent ages trying to work it out) does a much better job and the RPTS tries to put everything up. Its all useful.
But there’s much much more that’s too old to have gotten on to all these internet databases. That would be useful too. However, I think you are going to get lawyers to contribute on substantive material (coz that’s intersting) and geeks to contribute on stuff that is database like. Sadly I am both
.
Well, its a scandal that the court service decided to stop publishing what it was publishing – very much contrary to the trend towards openness. I was shocked when I found the judgment database (which I had been quietly scraping) was taken down. The tribunals service (via a much harder to scrape interface, Francis and I spent ages trying to work it out) does a much better job and the RPTS tries to put everything up. Its all useful.
But there’s much much more that’s too old to have gotten on to all these internet databases. That would be useful too. However, I think you are going to get lawyers to contribute on substantive material (coz that’s intersting) and geeks to contribute on stuff that is database like. Sadly I am both
.